Is procreative beneficence obligatory?

Procreative Beneficence, Obligation, and Eugenics

The argument of Julian Savulescu’s 2001 paper, “Procreative Beneficence: Why We Should Select the Best Children” is flawed in a number of respects. Savulescu confuses reasons with obligations and equivocates between the claim that parents have some reason to want the best for their children and the more radical claim that they are morally obligated to attempt to produce the best child possible....

Procreative beneficence: why we should select the best children.

Eugenic selection of embryos is now possible by employing in vitro fertilization (IVF) and preimplantation genetic diagnosis (PGD). While PGD is currently being employed for the purposes of detecting chromosomal abnormalities or inherited genetic abnormalities, it could in principle be used to test any genetic trait such as hair colour or eye colour. Genetic research is rapidly progressing into...

Therapeutic beneficence and placebo controls.

Wrongful Life and Procreative Decisions

This paper defends and refines the claim that procreation can be wrongful. Procreation is wrongful first when the "nonexistence condition" is met: the person's life will be filled with suffering that cannot be ameliorated or empty of all the things that make life worth living. Recognizing that this condition is rarely met, the paper then argues that it is wrong to create a person in less extrem...

Basic processes in reading: is visual word recognition obligatory?

Visual word recognition is commonly argued to be automatic in the sense that it is obligatory and ballistic. The present experiments combined Stroop and visual search paradigms to provide a novel test of this claim. An array of three, five, or seven words including one colored target (a word in Experiments 1 and 2, a bar in Experiment 3) was presented to participants. An irrelevant color word a...